Excerpt

The Terror

During the past several years, drug-related violence in northern Mexico has soared to unprecedented levels as drug cartels wage war on one another—and on anyone deemed uncooperative, unfriendly, or otherwise inconvenient. There have been more than 28,000 killings since 2006. And, inexorably, the violence is spreading northward, into the United States—whose appetite for drugs is largely responsible for the present tragedy. Ed Vulliamy is a writer for The Guardian and The Observer who has traveled the length of the U.S.-Mexico border to report on the breakdown of civil society and the outbreak of the drug wars. His extraordinary new book, Amexica: War Along the Borderline, will be published next month. Here is an excerpt.

Dr. Hiram Muñoz sees the world very clearly from across the slabs at his mortuary, in Tijuana, Mexico. Muñoz spends his working life, with expertise and dedication, trying to read messages in the mutilations and violations meted out to those who have been placed before him. He cross-examines the dead for what the killers may have been trying to say when they severed their victims’ heads, arms, legs, and fingers, often after sustained torture. He defines what he does as “trying to scientifically interrogate people who cannot talk.”

Muñoz is an employee of the prosecutor’s department in the Mexican state of Baja California; his patients, as he calls them, represent but a fraction of the more than 28,000 people who have been killed, often with hideous savagery, in the drug wars that have ravaged northern Mexico since December 2006. The perpetrators of these atrocities are hardly ever sought, let alone caught, let alone tried, let alone convicted. This is a conflict between the various narco-trafficking cartels that smuggle drugs into the United States. But as Muñoz knows better than anyone, the carnage in Mexico is both more complicated and more banal than that.

He explained his work to me during the first of several visits I have made to his mortuary. “Each different mutilation leaves a message,” he said. “The mutilations have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means the person talked too much—a snitch, or chupro. A man who has informed on the clan has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth.” This makes sense: a traitor to a narco-cartel is known as a dedo—a finger. “If you are castrated,” Muñoz continued, “you may have slept with or looked at the woman of another man in the business. Severed arms could mean that you stole from your consignment, severed legs that you tried to walk away from the cartel.”

There are gradations within these barbarities. “Sometimes they are done by a medical student, sometimes by just a butcher. It’s the medical students who have something to say. They are the ones trying to speak to us. I look at a cut-off toe. How was it done? Was it done well? Was it done from the left or the right? If it was done well, exactly between the bones, the person is more dangerous. If a finger was wrapped up tight before it was cut, we know we are dealing with the medical student, employed by the cartel hierarchy. If it’s just hacked off, we’re dealing with a malandro, a petty criminal. You need to cut it properly if you are going to send it to the victim’s family, or the police.”

In some cases the message is very blunt and all too clear, such as the message delivered by the 12 festering bodies lined up outside the Valentín Gómez Farías elementary school, in Tijuana, one morning in September 2008. The victims were naked, or partially dressed, and all of them had been tortured. Most had their tongues cut out. This was a message sent directly to children, something for them to think about as they consider their future lives in the community: Don’t talk too much. “It was a warning, and it means what it means,” said the head teacher, Miguel Ángel González Tovar.

Other cases are more difficult. On a slab one day in the summer of 2009, Muñoz showed me the headless body of the once lovely Adriana Alejandra Ruiz Muñiz, a model and a cheerleader for the local soccer team, Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente. A video of her death had been found on the mobile phone of a man named José Carlos Meza Zepeda, who was detained. Meza Zepeda protested his innocence, but he also claimed that Adriana had been a chupra, furnishing Mexican authorities with information about one of the point men in Tijuana for the Sinaloa Cartel. Adriana had had her fingernails pulled out and her fingers broken during the interrogation, after which she was decapitated.

Muñoz considered two hypotheses about Adriana: “that this case could be the big narcos, as they say it is, or a crime specifically against a woman, a so-called crime of passion by a common criminal, for what passion is more wrathful and violent than that of a man towards a woman he is obsessed with and cannot have? And this is, actually, my inclination in this case. I’ve looked very carefully at how the fingers have been broken, and it has not been done very well—you could almost call it careless, or reckless, but when the narcos are torturing an informant, the tracks they leave are never careless. They would have sliced the fingers off at the joints, not merely crushed them, maybe so as to send them to someone.

“Decapitation, however,” the doctor went on, “is another thing altogether: it is simply a statement of power, a warning to all, like public executions of old. The difference is that in normal times the dead were ‘disappeared’ or dumped in the desert. Now they are executed and displayed for all to see so that it becomes a war against the people.”

And that it certainly is: an orgy of violence spiraling toward a bottom that is nowhere in sight.

The current murderous phase in Mexico’s narco-war began in 2005, at one of the busiest commercial border crossings in the world, between the city of Nuevo Laredo, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and the city of Laredo, in the American state of Texas. Some $150 billion in trade transits the border by truck and railroad at this location every year. According to Gerardo Lozano, Nuevo Laredo’s “ambassador” in city hall on the Texas side, an estimated 3 percent of all the goods passing through are contraband. That is why, in 2005, the Sinaloa Cartel, led by the fugitive drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, laid siege to Nuevo Laredo, taking on the Gulf Cartel, which controlled the corridor. The Gulf Cartel fought strenuously to beat Guzmán back. The conflict has metastasized from there.

The scale of the violence ultimately prompted Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to mobilize 40,000 federal troops and send them to the border. He did so within days of taking office, in December 2006. But as the fourth anniversary of the Calderón offensive approaches—and as Mexico celebrates its bicentennial as an independent nation—the bloodbath along the border shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it has begun to seep into other parts of the country. Even Calderón concedes that the conflict will “intensify” before it is brought under control.

Calderón’s admission came after the discovery last August of the bodies of 72 people—58 men and 14 women—on a ranch near San Fernando, in Tamaulipas. This is turf controlled by the Gulf Cartel and its terrifying but temperamental and sometimes mutinous military wing, the Zetas. The dead are believed to be mainly Central American migrants headed for the U.S. border. They probably had resisted demands that they pay additional bribes or assist the cartel smuggling them across, and been summarily executed. The massacre was the worst single episode of the narco-war to date, and even managed to become a big story in the United States, where there has not been much appetite for news of the accumulating carnage, even though most of it has occurred within walking distance of the border. And, in fact, the violence does not always stay on one side, the way it is supposed to.

Spring 2010 had begun with President Barack Obama’s announcement of a phased deployment of up to 1,200 National Guard reinforcements to the U.S.-Mexico border. From August 1, troops had begun to arrive. During the next few weeks, the news from northern Mexico was pretty much indistinguishable from the news in any other monthlong period during the past several years. Here’s a capsule summary:

Weekend of August 13–15: Forty-seven people are killed in Ciudad Juárez alone.

August 18: The tortured body of Edel­mi­ro Cavazos, the mayor of the northern-Mexican town of Santiago, near Monterrey, Mexico’s richest city, is found three days after he was abducted. Cavazos’s hands are bound and his head is wrapped in duct tape.

August 21: A federal-police convoy in Juárez is ambushed by a paramilitary narco-unit with explosives and automatic weapons. The Mexican authorities refuse to reveal the number of dead and wounded.

On the same day: A stray bullet from a gunfight in Juárez hits a building on the campus at the University of Texas, El Paso, across the Rio Grande from Juárez. No one is hurt.

August 22: The decapitated bodies of four men are left hanging by their ankles from a bridge in the affluent city of Cuernavaca, a favored weekend spot for Mexico City’s upper class. Messages hung with the bodies proclaim that this will be the fate of anyone supporting a drug lord named Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as “La Barbie” for his pale complexion and blue eyes, in his battle for control of the Beltran Leyva Cartel. The following day, 10 people are killed in Juárez.

August 24: The bodies of the 72 migrants are found in Tamaulipas.

August 27: Roberto Suárez, the investigating prosecutor for the Tamaulipas massacre, is reported missing. Car bombs explode outside a television station in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, and the San Fernando police station.

On the same day: The U.S. State Department announces that it is calling home all children of consular diplomats and U.S.-government employees working in Monterrey.

August 29: Ten killings in Ciudad Juárez bring the total for 2010 past the 2,000 mark. Since January 2008, 6,383 people have been murdered in Juárez.

August 30: Federal police announce the arrest of Edgar Valdez Villarreal, the indirect target of the Cuernavaca executions. Villarreal had been indicted in May, in Atlanta, Georgia, for overseeing the distribution of thousands of pounds of cocaine across the eastern United States.

On the same day: The Mexican government reveals that 3,200 federal police officers, nearly a 10th of the force, have been fired this year for corruption. An additional 465 federal officers face criminal charges, and 1,020 others face disciplinary action.

August 31: In Ciudad Juárez, the 15 murders within the past 24 hours make August the most violent month in the city’s recent history—a total of 336 killed, which surpasses the annual total in any year before 2008. Of the dead, 40 are women, which is a monthly rec­ord.

The Mexican cartels now supply some 90 percent of the cocaine and a substantial portion of other drugs entering the United States. It is a business estimated by the Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) to be worth roughly $323 billion a year. There once was a time when the drug cartels divided the smuggling turf, the so-called plazas, precariously among themselves. That broke down when the most powerful syndicate the Sinaloa Cartel, serially laid claim to the entire frontier, challenging its rivals one after another.

And yet some of the most savage violence is committed not over the international smuggling routes but over control of the domestic plaza of Mexico itself. Mexico is no longer just a staging point. The cities of borderland Mexico are now ravaged by hard drugs—crack, heroin, crystal meth, and methamphetamine. Many of the victims of the violence are young people in rehab centers run by courageous religious groups, like the members of Anexo de Vida (Annex of Life) in the Barrio Azul neighborhood of Ciudad Juárez. On September 15, 2009, seven addicts and three staff at the Barrio Azul center were gunned down without warning. I walked through the facility 12 hours later, stepping around the pools of sticky blood and the killers’ scarlet boot-prints. Walls and mattresses had been shot up. Personal possessions were strewn everywhere. The remains of a last supper lay nearby. The rehab clinics have become targets because those who try to break their addictions are seeking freedom, which to the drug lords is intolerable.

The killing in northern Mexico has become qualitatively more grotesque. “Bone tickling” involves scraping the bone with an ice pick sunk through the flesh. Doctors are employed to ensure that those questioned or tortured do not lose consciousness. Bodies turn up with the phone number for emergency services carved into their skin—in effect, “Call 911.” One cartel, La Familia, made its “coming out” known in a famous episode: bowling five severed heads across the floor of a discotheque. In Sonora in 2009, a white S.U.V. was found abandoned, and inside it a butcher’s display of mutilated bodies—hacked, chopped, castrated, decapitated. It was a carful of human cutlets, with no apparent relationship of one piece to another until they were matched by forensic authorities. Earlier this year, 36-year-old Hugo Hernandez was abducted in Sonora; his body turned up a week later in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, but not in a single piece. His torso was in one location, his severed arms and legs (boxed) in another. The face had been cut off. It was found near city hall, sewn to a soccer ball. In Ciudad Juárez, in November 2008, as dawn broke over the desert, a body was found hanging from a highway overpass. It had been decapitated and was dangling by a rope tied around the armpits. It was still there an hour later, when I saw it—swaying in the wind, hands cuffed behind its back. Next to the victim the executioners had hung a sheet, on which they had painted a message: yo lazaro flores, apoyo a mi patron, el monte perros—“I, Lazaro Flores, served my boss, the dog fucker.” There is a darkness in these acts that recalls the atrocities committed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But one can’t escape the feeling that they are something else besides—that the killings are recreational.

Mexico’s war is a war of the digital age, fought as much on YouTube and mobile phones as it is in city streets and backroom torture chambers. Cartels use YouTube to exhibit their interrogations and executions, and to threaten rivals and public officials. They set up rogue “hot spot” digital sites to display their handiwork. One such site, hosted from El Paso, received more than 320,000 hits and posted more than 1,000 comments. You can view all this as a form of cyber-sado-pornography, which it is. But unlike the cyber-strutting of al-Qaeda, from whom it is sometimes argued they got the idea, the narcos use digital communications with a particular attitude. If you asked them, they might even call it a sense of humor.

Murder extends to family members, even children. This is not entirely new: during the 1980s, the original Mexican godfather, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, needed to deal with an encroachment into his Guadalajara turf by an interloper named Hector Palma. Gallardo tasked one of his operatives to seduce Palma’s wife and run off with the wife and the children—which he did. One day, Palma received a package by courier: it contained his wife’s severed head. Palma learned later that his children had been pushed to their deaths off a bridge. In Ciudad Juárez, in August 2009, a seven-year-old was shot dead while cleaning windshields at a traffic light. Last January, 16 young people at a party in Juárez were trapped and summarily executed.

The Mexican narco-war may be the first real 21st-century war—a war that is, in the end, about nothing. Yes, there are regional and clan identities involved—loyalties of a sort to Tamaulipas, to Michoacan, to Sinaloa—but they are too fluid, too subject to betrayal, for the war to be defined as tribal. Yes, the Mexicans are torturing and killing one another over money and the smuggling routes that provide it, but much of the savagery, as noted, is over the smaller profits of the domestic market, the street corner, the sprawling colonia—savagery perpetrated for little real reward, and mainly for its own sake. Mexico’s war has no single propelling cause, no single objective, and certainly no grand ideology. It is a conflict of a post-political era. It belongs to an age of aggressive hyper-materialism. The drug lords are of course not alone in this. There are “legitimate” corporations all over the world whose only credo is greed and whose only iconic value is “the brand.”

Globalization is very much part of the story. In Juárez, says Julián Cardona, a photographer whose work has documented northern Mexico’s social implosion, the narrative of the narco-war is inseparable from that of the thousands of maquiladora sweatshop assembly plants that produce goods for duty-free export across the Rio Grande to the United States. “I used to call my town a city of two economies,” Cardona explains, “one legal, the other illegal. But now that both are globalized, the dividing line has gone. Both the maquilas and the drug plaza are based on the notion that the market will find its proper balance, and the market alone will dictate how Juárez will do business. And that is exactly what has happened. The ‘legal’ economy brought hundreds of thousands of people to Juárez, me included, to work in maquilas, as I did, and offers to pay them $3 a shift. The illegal market needs people, and offers better opportunities, to double that money for street dealing, multiply it by 10 for a carrier, and by a hundred for killing. The maquila jobs market can’t support what it created, so it sends you to get sucked into the parallel drug market, where you get paid in kind, you become an addict, you cut the drugs to sell, so that your addiction becomes an activity in the market, and you become an economic agent. When the recession comes, the maquilas find cheaper labor in Asia, so more people lose their jobs and turn in even greater numbers to buying, taking, and selling drugs. And killing.”

While the narco-wars may have been fought, at the outset, over the control of a diversified product line, the casus belli at this point is far more ill-defined. For many of the combatants, perhaps most, what is now at stake is nothing more than the most ephemeral accoutrements of modern consumerism. In Reynosa, the scene of appalling recent violence, a human-rights activist named Mario Trevino, who works with migrants, makes this observation: “They’re doing it for the money, but more than that, they’re doing it for kudos. They’re doing it to show they can wear this T-shirt by this designer worth this much money—instead of that one that the other guy is wearing. It’s like stripes on a military uniform—corporal, sergeant. It’s a system of rank: if you have this T-shirt, you get a cute girl to show off; if you have a more expensive T-shirt, you get a cuter girl. Same with the cars, phones, gadgets. They’re disgusting people, high on amphetamines, but in Reynosa they can wear the uniform of their rank, and they’re somebody.”

None of this is unrelated to the fact that Mexico is a country where deep poverty for the masses exists alongside vast wealth for the very few, or to the fact that Mexico is connected to an economic and iconic superpower, the United States, by a 2,000-mile border. The border is as porous as it is severe. It is being militarized from the north, in the form of a physical and virtual wall, and yet nearly a million people legally cross the border every day to work, shop, attend school, or visit relatives. The border is being reinforced by increasing numbers of armed agents of the U.S. government: the National Guard, the Border Patrol, the D.E.A., immigration officers, customs officers, and many others.

But no one any longer pretends that the United States is removed from Mexico’s drug war—from its causes or its consequences. The Obama administration has broken two taboos that had long impeded honest discourse. First, Barack Obama and his secretary of state now talk for the first time about “co-responsibility” for the narco-war in northern Mexico, and about its prime cause: America’s (and Europe’s) insatiable demand for illegal drugs in all their forms. Second, the silence has also been broken on another domain of co-responsibility: the so-called Iron River of guns smuggled from the United States to the Mexican cartels, which makes so much of the violence possible.

It is every citizen’s right to bear arms in America, and the Sunday-afternoon gun-show crowd at the convention center in Pharr, Texas, is for the most part made up of families who have come to browse, farmers who need to protect livestock, hunters intending to hunt, and teenagers wanting nothing more than to blow holes through road signs. But a gun show in Pharr is a little different from a gun show in most other places in the United States. The convention center is only six miles from the Mexican border and only eight miles from Reynosa—the stronghold of the Zetas. In January 2009, three off-duty police officers were having a drink at the El Booty Lounge, in Pharr, when a man lobbed a grenade into the bar. The grenade was traced to Monterrey. In March 2009, Pharr witnessed the first serious engagement in President Obama’s intensification of the offensive against gun smuggling to Mexico. This was Project Gunrunner, which intercepted a tractor-trailer, bound for Reynosa, filled with semi-automatic-rifle barrels, firearm accessories, and gunpowder. At the back of the Pharr convention center is a bookstall where you can find U.S. Army manuals that offer tips on how to make bombs, how to blow up bridges, and how to convert legal semi-automatic weapons to “Full Auto,” skills that most weekend hunters rarely use.

Dewey Webb is the special agent in charge at the Houston division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which covers a tranche of East Texas and the borderland as far as Del Rio, opposite Ciudad Acuña—Zeta country. “All our investigations,” says Webb, “show that Houston is the No. 1 source for firearms going from the U.S. into Mexico—the No. 1 source in the country. Texas has 8,000 gun dealers, and in the city of Houston there are 1,500. The pattern we’re seeing is that they’ll go to the shows to buy ammo and supplies, combat gear, and so on, and go to the dealers to get their weapons, using straw buyers for $50 per gun, on up. They come, and they just keep coming back. It’s simple because we make it simple. There’s no black market in the U.S. The guns are not being stolen—it’s all legal.”

Mexico’s violence has crossed the border in many ways and many places. The Zetas have been linked to killings across the Deep South. In August 2008, five men were found with their throats slit in Columbiana, Alabama, after being tortured with electricity. The F.B.I. says the victims owed a debt of $400,000 to the Gulf Cartel. In July of that year, Atlanta police had shot and killed a Gulf Cartel operative arriving to pick up a $2 million kidnap ransom. In the summer of 2008, police found a citizen of the Dominican Republic bound, gagged, and chained to a wall—but alive—in the Atlanta suburb of Lilburn; he owed $300,000 to the Gulf Cartel. To give some idea of the degree to which Mexican cartels are operating inside the United States: a government sweep called Operation Xcellerator, which ended in February 2009, rounded up more than 750 members of the Sinaloa Cartel throughout the country, from California’s Imperial Valley to Washington, D.C. In the process, the authorities also seized 26,000 pounds of cocaine and some $59 million in cash.

Houston has become the new hub for cartel criminality north of the border, replacing Los Angeles. The F.B.I. in Houston describes how two generations of gangs have put themselves at the service of the Gulf Cartel in particular: the older Texas Syndicate, with its tight structures, life membership, and culture of what the Italian Mafia calls omertà, or silence, and the younger Houstone Tango Blast gang, which one agent told me was “more like Facebook—the gang changes according to what you need that day.” A reporter for the Houston Chronicle, Dane Schiller, has been writing for years on the internecine killings organized by Mexican cartels in Houston. For instance, there is the case of Santiago “Chago” Salinas, a Gulf Cartel operative shot in the head at point-blank range at the Baymont Inn & Suites on the Gulf Freeway, in 2006. There is the case of the married couple found tortured to death in their home on Easingwold Drive, in northwest Houston, with 220 pounds of cocaine stashed in the attic. And there is the case of Pedro Cárdenas, the nephew of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, founder of the Zetas, who was murdered and dumped in a ditch near Fort Bend County.

The degree to which American law-enforcement agencies have themselves been penetrated by the cartels is a subject of debate—but no one doubts that they have been. One longtime customs special agent, now retired, told me, “While it gets harder for us to infiltrate them, they’ll use relatives and friends to infiltrate us.” Another former special agent, Butch Barrett, who lives in Douglas, Arizona, observes, “There’s going to be a situation where you have a guy in law enforcement and his cousins are across the border. And he’s going to get a call saying, ‘Hey, we’d like you to join the customs service and do as you’re told’—let this car through or turn a blind eye there. And that’s going to be said by your cousin on the other side, and it’s going to be an offer you can’t refuse. And that’s happened, because I know it has.”

I mentioned two taboos in America that have been broken. There is a third taboo that has not yet been broken: the question of money, the narco-greenbacks, the $323 billion a year. Where does it go? How does it travel from the cartels back into the economy? What financial institutions are helping to launder these dollars? Former customs special agent Lee Morgan said to me, “Kinda strange, ain’t it, how Washington’s got all this technology, but never goes after the money?”

Last March, the Bloomberg financial-news Web site reported that Wachovia Bank, now owned by Wells Fargo, had admitted to federal prosecutors that, in the years 2003–8, it had failed to prevent the laundering of at least $110 million of drug-cartel money through the exchange houses it operated in Mexico. The bank also admitted that it had failed to monitor $420 billion in transactions through these same exchange houses. Wachovia agreed to pay $160 million to end the criminal investigation, acknowledging “serious and systematic” violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Jeffrey Sloman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, stated that the bank’s “blatant disregard for our banking laws” had given the international cocaine cartels “a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations.”

Hiram Muñoz enjoys the task of “necropsy,” as he calls it, because, he says, “I love medicine, and I love the law.” But Muñoz is also compelled by what all this violence means, what it says about the times we live in, in contrast to those we left behind not so long ago. “The difference is this,” he says. “In what I would call normal times, I kill you and make you disappear. Now they are shouting it, turning it into a kind of grotesque carousel around their territory. In normal conditions, the torture and killing is private. Now it is a public execution using extreme violence, and this is significant, I think.”

He goes on: “We need to say one thing first: these people are drama queens. They think what they do makes them powerful, masters of the universe. But they’re not. Ultimately, what they do is pathetic. We have to remember that. They keep saying they’re poor people—well, they’re poor in culture, that’s what they are. They have no culture.” Muñoz thinks back to the way it used to be: “The narcos in the old days had been to school. They knew that to be kingpins they had to provide light, hospitals, and schools. That way, they could keep a low profile, win respect, and protect themselves. These new people just want luxury, power, and more power, until they either get arrested or killed. They reflect a society without values. I don’t even think they are against our society. I think they’re products of it. People without culture or values in a society without culture or values. A society that has gone from Frank Sinatra to that 50 Cent man I see on television. They’re both associated with criminals—almost everyone is, if they really want to make it—but look at the difference between them! 50 Cent is the new role model for the narco; Sinatra is old-school—I know which I’d rather have.”

Muñoz is a man of courtesy and, somehow, of exceptionally good humor. His work has made him a fatalist, perhaps an existentialist. “I spend all day with the dead,” he replies, “so I have a duty to love life, and live it to the full. When I am with my colleagues, we’re always joking about death, and joking with death. I live like a man who sits eating a delicious taco on the street there, aware that every moment could be his last. One bullet and he is dead.”